”The primary campaign may look like a pickup game about to descend into a brawl, but there’s a national candidate somewhere in the lineup”, skriver Amy Davidson med anledning av Ulriksens omslagsbild.

“Behind these Republicans, there is a face in the locker-room door’s window: Hillary Clinton, peeking in. Once they’re done with their intramural shoving match, they’ll mostly likely have to play against her.”

To the island of Gotland for Sweden’s annual political festival — elegantly flat-packed into a few days, rather than the weeks of party conferences to which Brits are subjected. Each party has a dedicated day but everyone mixes. I spot the leader of the Christian Democrats; she’s 28 years old. (‘It’s the new 45!’ explains one of her staffers). Party leaders mix with dog-walkers in the park and anyone can turn up to speeches. Quite a contrast to Britain, where party conferences are sealed off from the public by a ring of steel. Things could go wrong — a recent Nordic noir novel imagines Sweden’s entire political class held hostage in Almedalen, the festival site. But the worst that has actually happened was a feminist shaking her naked breasts at the Prime Minister. It’s a risk that the Swedes are prepared to run.

The Woodstock mood of this conference has been rather dampened of late by the presence of the Sweden Democrats, a populist anti-immigration party who now have enough seats to qualify for their own day in Almedalen. Everyone else talks about how to crush the party, but not many talk about the issues that trouble its voters. It’s a fairly typical problem in Scandinavia, which is why, for the first time since the war, only one nation — Sweden — has a social democratic party in power. Populists have felled all the others, and felled Sweden’s conservatives last year.

The problem is fairly obvious to any visitor to Stockholm. The authorities have become so welcoming to immigrants that they are turning a blind eye to misbehaviour, leaving Romanian beggars free to patrol the city’s underground and even camp in the shopping streets. This has changed the look and feel of several Swedish cities. To make matters worse, the government’s euphemism for beggars is ‘EU migrants’, as if all this was the natural result of immigration, rather than poor policing. Tragically, Sweden’s openness is now eating itself, as many voters have come to associate immigration with social decay and disorder.

One woman tells me that she and others now accompany Jews on their way home from the synagogue in Malmö to protect them from Muslim gangs. Such stories are enough to make Swedes wonder whether the government has lost control. My job is to talk about Britain’s ability to integrate immigrants — which, I argue, has been a standout success. Newcomers find work fairly easily here, our police keep order fairly well, and our far-right party, the BNP, was crushed at the general election (its support fell 99.7 per cent).

It is my duty however, for I am sure you would wish me to state the facts as I see them to you, to place before you certain facts about the present position in Europe.

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow. Athens alone-Greece with its immortal glories-is free to decide its future at an election under British, American and French observation. The Russian-dominated Polish Government has been encouraged to make enormous and wrongful inroads upon Germany, and mass expulsions of millions of Germans on a scale grievous and undreamed-of are now taking place. The Communist parties, which were very small in all these Eastern States of Europe, have been raised to pre-eminence and power far beyond their numbers and are seeking everywhere to obtain totalitarian control. Police governments are prevailing in nearly every case, and so far, except in Czechoslovakia, there is no true democracy.

[…]

The safety of the world requires a new unity in Europe, from which no nation should be permanently outcast. It is from the quarrels of the strong parent races in Europe that the world wars we have witnessed, or which occurred in former times, have sprung. Twice in our own lifetime we have seen the United States, against their wishes and their traditions, against arguments, the force of which it is impossible not to comprehend, drawn by irresistible forces, into these wars in time to secure the victory of the good cause, but only after frightful slaughter and devastation had occurred. Twice the United States has had to send several millions of its young men across the Atlantic to find the war; but now war can find any nation, wherever it may dwell between dusk and dawn. Surely we should work with conscious purpose for a grand pacification of Europe, within the structure of the United Nations and in accordance with its Charter. That I feel is an open cause of policy of very great importance.